[O]ne must note that in the United States “socialism” signifies differently. It is a discourse belonging to the past (bringing back memories of the Cold War) that still feels like it has the possibility of disrupting the present. But I suspect that people here have seized on the word not out of a deep commitment to the term or its history, or even to a specific set of values. Instead, it seems to be a placeholder for a feeling of profound dissatisfaction, even despair, about the current order of things, and a sense that we have been betrayed in a fundamental way by our government and by the “economy” as such. (I think that this feeling itself traverses national boundaries.)
In some ways, at the present moment, it is difficult to not be anti-capitalist, and here capitalism is not an abstract or difficult term at all (whether we accept Marx’s analysis in Capital or not) because it is experienced in everyday humiliations and suffering: not being able to go to the doctor or buy the necessary medicines because you cannot afford it, accumulations of enormous debts that demand the majority of one’s salary and will never be repaid, the lack of access to clean water for drinking, cooking, and cleaning. When added to constant and often murderous police violence, especially (but certainly not exclusively) against black people, and the ongoing sense that the climate is rapidly changing in a global sense, but also in concrete ways that also produce mass suffering (hurricanes, floods, fires, drought), it is not hard to see why anxiety, depression, drug addiction, and suicide rates are all increasing. Meanwhile, the comforts of the wealthy are quite ostentatiously displayed all around us.
Together, this has produced a situation in which an overtly socialist organization such as the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] can experience dramatic growth. There are explicit goals—“Medicare for all,” a “Green New Deal”—and concrete slogans—“people over profit”—which I think need not be linked up to any specific “ism.” Politically, the positions and impulses at work within the group range from revolutionary communism and anarchism to liberalism. In the short term, the goal seems to be something like social democracy achieved through electoral means. There is a basic democratic impulse behind the movement, a sense that both the government and the economy should be run more democratically. The point of agreement among the different tendencies within the group is a shared opposition to an inhumane system and a willingness to entertain what Ernst Bloch might have called concrete hopes.
Some people, young people in particular, believe not only that things should be different, but that they could be.
— Jonathan Flatley, "What Has Happened to the Left Revolutionary Project?: A Conversation on the Occasion of the Publication of Revolution Today." The South Atlantic Quarterly, 2020, p. 613-614. Breaks added for readability.
